The Last Castle

 In the movie "The Last Castle" Robert Redford is a 4 star General being court martialled of defying the Commander-in-Chief. He is sentenced to a military jail. Upon arriving he is greeted by the unscrupulous head of the prison played by actor James Gandolfini, who plays the role of a military man himself in charge of the prison. He shows Robert Redford some of his military collections. After browsing through those Redford said - "The nature of the collection aptly describes a man who has never stepped into a battlefield". The head of the prison wasn't amused at all.

The Ukraine War is now almost a month long. Many Russia supporters wrote off Ukraine, predicting the aggressor Putin marauding through Ukraine like hot knife through butter. But a stubbornly resilient, Ukrainian President Zelensky, a dark horse before the war has proved his detractors who have never stepped a day in their life on a battlefield wrong. Incidentally the views of many of my friends who have actually stepped on a battle field is more fair, balanced and nuanced.

War is impossible to predict. We don't know what's in store tomorrow. Truth is the first casualty of war. We don't know what's really happening in the war zone. But what we know is that it is irrefutable Russia hasn't made the progress it  hoped. The more the war lingers on, more it is likely for Russia to get into a quagmire which it never wished for at first place. With victory getting elusive let's see how many of Putin's fans who have never stepped on a battlefield keep supporting him !